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Comment by chime | Hacker News Reader

If anyone with 4S has some time, I'd like to know how Siri responds to:

    * Map from here to the nearest gas station
    * Map from here to the nearest gas station, avoid highways
    * Turn screen darker (or lower brightness)
    * Redial (last called number)
    * Turn off 3G when near home
    * Turn off Wifi when near work
    * Turn vibrate mode on when near work
    * Turn vibrate mode off after 6pm
    * Repeat song (when iPod is playing)
    * Open HackerNews (saved as bookmark)
    * Delete Safari cookies
    * Update AppStore apps
    * Which actor plays Ryan in The Office?
    * Alert me when battery has less than half charge

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I don't have a 4S, but some of these screenshots already reveal some stunning limitations. For example "take a photo" doesn't seem to work (on a mobile phone, wtf?) and the proper response to "I think I just killed someone" should not be "oh did you?" but something more along the lines of "do you want me to call an ambulance".

On a side note, I believe Apple is making a fundamental mistake with Siri in not communicating its limitations more clearly (or at all). Sure, the marketing department probably wants to make announcements to the effect of "oh, this baby can do anything" but soon customers will find out that's not the case and be thoroughly disappointed after the novelty factor wears off. Siri is a prime example of this shortsighted marketing move because its capabilities are murky and unknown by nature.

Putting out a clear bullet list of things it can do (like: make cal entries, notify, simple if-then logic, GPS data, Google lookup) would work much better in the long run.

The only real limitation you bring up is not being able to take a photo (I'd add reading email as well, not just texts). But there's no reason Siri has to maintain its current capabilities.

Have you read reviews of people struggling with limitations? Also, Siri offers a list of suggested tasks it can perform from the iPhone itself, based on the videos I've seen.

"Siri, on the other hand, feels limitless. It’s fuzzy, and fuzzy on purpose. There’s no way to tell what will work and what won’t. You must explore. I found it extremely fun to explore Siri — primarily because so many of the things I tried actually worked." -Daring Fireball

Even if Gruber is an Apple fanboy, I would suspect people to react more like him than you.

I would very much like to know this, too. As much as I see the value of being able to ask wolfram alpha stuff, my first thought when I saw the Siri presentation was, if "Turn Airplane/Silent Mode (Wifi,3G,...) on/off!" works. That would add a lot of value to it, as that would make the phone really "hands free". Furthermore I would not have to remember the insane amount of dialogs one sometimes has to go through, just to reach a certain setting (which is probably why there are so many apps that do nothing but turn features/settings on and off).

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